Re: My Saga, Part 1

March 10, 2015

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CreditCreditPeter van Agtmael/Magnum

It was “fun,” it was “looong,” it was “frankly somewhat bizarre,” it was a “wonderful disaster.” Our first installment of the Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard’s account of his journey from Newfoundland to Detroit — with lengthy digressions on going bowling, fixing a clogged toilet and a meal at the Pizza Delight in the Viking Mall — was one thing for sure: provocative.

“Karl Ove Knausgaard is the world’s worst travel writer,” Slate’s Katy Waldman declared. “As if he’d wrought his prose from some insight-resistant material,” she wrote, Knausgaard “is a master at arranging banal facts in a row and letting you wonder: Is this boredom I feel? Or drafts from the invisible wings of genius? Does it matter?”

On Twitter, Marketplace’s Lizzie O’Leary argued that the piece highlighted “Knausgaard’s solipsism, lack of curiosity about others & refusal to be a grown-up.” But where some saw self-involvement, others picked up on a literary device. “He’s lampooning a way of thinking he sometimes slips into,” replied the journalist Evan Hughes, who profiled Knausgaard for The New Republic last year, “as he often does in ‘My Struggle,’ ” author’s six-volume autobiographical novel.

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CreditIllustration by Tom Gauld

Was the article evidence that Knausgaard is a solipsistic blowhard or proof that he is a great writer? For readers in the places he visited, it didn’t seem to matter.

“New York Times Writer Shocked at ‘Fat’ Newfoundlanders,” read the headline in The Telegram in St. John’s, noting “unflattering pictures of the region and its people,” especially a passage in which the writer observed patrons at Jungle Jim’s, a safari-themed steak-and-nachos joint in St. Anthony.

“What a jerk,” one commenter wrote on The Telegram site.

“Yes, the Newfoundlanders might have a pound or two on, but they know how to party, make a joke, look after the neighbors,” wrote another, identified as Johnnie. “A Norwegian party consists of 10 gallons of bad booze, a darkened room, half a candle and a suicide note.”

For many, the author’s experiences seemed to boil down to a series of quotidian observations. “Knausgaard’s America so far: clogged toilet, nice cabdriver, bitter cold, sad Detroit, country conformist, fat,” observed KCRW’s Madeleine Brand, on Twitter.

Over at Slate’s Culture Gabfest — where contributors guessed that the article was 2,300 to 4,400 words shorter than the 10,305 words it actually was — Stephen Metcalf offered an impassioned defense of those rote details. “All of us in the overeducated affluent West right now have this inner sense of thwarted grandiosity,” he said to his colleagues Dana Stevens and Julia Turner (whose reactions were less enthusiastic). “But inside us is this hectoring inner self that wonders why our outer life is so crushingly disappointing.”

Some readers were more perplexed. “What is it about this guy’s writing that compels me to read every single word he writes?” a comment on our site asked.

“He’s a modern person on a pointless journey and dealing with all of the mundanities of modern life, like overflowing toilets and lost paperwork,” replied Jessica Brent, a reader in New Jersey. “But he is an artist and makes meaning and beauty out of it. He shows us what it means to be human, and that’s heroic in its own way.”

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